Probably the consensus view among evangelicals, at least, is that the tithe is not mandatory for Christians — this being a specific commandment of Torah that is not binding on those of us who are not ancient Israelites — but that it’s a very good idea to give away a significant portion of your income and 10 percent seems to be a good figure. For one thing, it’s very useful for those of us who are bad at math to simply move the decimal point over one place. But it’s also a figure significant enough to be meaningful without being so high as to be impossible. Don’t believe me? Believe the surveys that consistently show the most generous contributors to charitable causes are the working class and the very wealthy. The very wealthy can easily afford to give away well in excess of 10 percent of their incomes; the working class give away a fairly small amount in actual dollars when they give away even 10 percent.

The problem, it seems, comes when we move into the middle class. It’s counterintuitive, but for most folks it’s harder to give away $10,000 when they make $100,000 than it is to give away $5,000 when they make $50,000 — even though they have $50,000 more to play with. Perhaps it’s because things that were once out of reach become accessible; perhaps it’s because so many things are accessible that we think we can (or should) have not only the ski vacation but the new car and the private school tuition and the granite countertops and the boat and the spa weekend and the season tickets and so on and so on and so on.

The beauty of giving generously, even sacrificially, is that by doing so we are forced to deal with our own finitude, with the fact that for most of us our appetites can never be fully satisfied, that if we seek to gratify ourselves in every conceivable way we’ll still find ourselves wanting more. Giving — especially giving a specific percentage right off the top — is a discipline that ultimately frees us to allocate the money we have in accordance with our best ideals rather than simply to gratify our basest desires.

Not to mention it helps out a whole lot of people who need that money more than we do.

So try it out. Next time you get paid, immediately take 10 percent of the big number on your pay stub (not the really big year-to-date number, of course, but the big one for your pay this period) and give it to a worthy cause. We have three international relief organizations headquartered right here in Baltimore; our church sponsors World Relief, but there’s also Catholic Relief Services and Lutheran World Relief. Your local food bank can always use funds, especially since for all the fun we have rounding up canned goods it’s much more efficient for them to receive cash donations and use them to buy food from vendors at a steep discount. Our church sponsors the Community Crisis Center, which serves needy people in the Reisterstown-Owings Mills area. Baltimore is also host to a number of fine educational institutions; our church supports the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at St. Mary’s Seminary and University. And don’t forget the cultural institutions keeping those starving artists fed; my wife is a conductor for the Greater Baltimore Youth Orchestras, which run a wonderful program that puts instruments in the hands of the neediest schoolchildren in Baltimore.

No doubt my fellow In Good Faith readers have their own favorite charities; please, list them in the comments. Perhaps O’Malley and Ehrlich campaign staff will wander through soon looking to do some damage control.